Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and wealthy Lt. Gov. candidate Sarah Godlewski laughed hysterically at the way rural Wisconsinites speak, and it’s on video. Mocking the so-called country “rubes” just exposes how out-of-touch the urbanist Crowley and Godlewski – who are from Milwaukee and Madison – are with the rest of the state.
In fact, they posted the video themselves because apparently Crowley, the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor, and Godlewski, the current secretary of state, think it’s hysterical to make fun of rural Wisconsinites. In the video, Crowley says, “You betcha,” and then they both start laughing hysterically.
It’s not surprising that Godlewski is out of touch with rural, working class Wisconsinites; in 2021, she and her husband reported “assets worth between $24.7 million and $60.6 million.” For two years, she paid no state income tax while pushing a wealth tax. A former opponent wrote in a news release, “Prior to selling their home in December of 2017 and moving to Wisconsin, they (Godlewski and her husband, Max Duckworth) lived in the D.C. area where he worked as the Director of Portfolio Management and Trading for Constellation Energy Group.”
“In what has been called the “largest of its kind”, Maxim Duckworth and three of his business partners caused his firm, Constellation Energy Group, to pay a $245 million dollar fine to resolve allegations of market manipulation with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,” that news release says.
The Origins of ‘You Betcha’ in Midwestern Speech
The phrase “you betcha,” which has become a signature line for Congressman Tom Tiffany, who hails from rural Wisconsin. But it’s actually how people speak in some areas of rural Wisconsin and the Midwest.
This author grew up in northern Wisconsin and can verify – yes, rural Wisconsinites sometimes talk like that. Actually, the phrase’s origins date back to the 1800s.
Linguistic patterns and accents in Wisconsin derived from European immigration. “The Midwest became a crossroads of settlers from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, migrants from the Upland South, immigrants from Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Poland, and later African American communities moving north during the Great Migration. Their speech patterns mixed, adapted, and evolved,” says Owlcation.
It’s also been called “a classic ‘Nordie’ phrase, characteristic (in a cartoon sense) of the Scandinavian folks of the US Upper Midwest.”
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